CIA interrogators threatened to kill children of Sept 11 plotter

WASHINGTON - Interrogators at secret CIA prisons threatened to kill the children of alleged September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and rape the mother of another detainee, documents showed Monday.
The latest disclosures came in the release of heavily-censored CIA documents that showed interrogators used those and other forms of intimidation to extract information from Al-Qaeda detainees held overseas.

The interrogators "said to Mohammed that if anything else happens in the United States, 'We're going to kill your children,'" according to official CIA documents released by the Department of Justice.
Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, was held at secret CIA prisons until 2006 before his arrival at the US detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Interrogators tried to lead Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the suspected bomber of the USS Cole, to believe that female relatives would be sexually abused in front of him if he did not provide information about future planned acts of terror.
"We could get your mother in here," an interrogator was quoted as telling Nashiri, playing on widely-held fears in Middle East circles that sexual abuse of female relatives was a commonly used technique to extract information from a detainee. "We can bring your family in here."
The documents, released by the Monday CIA's inspector general, appear to demonstrate that some interrogators went beyond legally-authorized techniques, resorting to what many critics would deem torture.
Nashiri, who was captured in November 2002 and held for four years in one of the CIA's secret prisons, ultimately became one of three Al-Qaeda leaders subjected to waterboarding, a form of near drowning widely regarded as torture.
A federal judge in New York ordered release of the redacted version of the classified CIA inspector general's report in response to a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union.
The report, written in 2004, gave other details about interrogation tactics, including episodes in which some detainees were threatened with death or grave injury if they refused to cooperate.
In one instance, a CIA interrogator showed Nashiri a gun and sought to frighten the detainee into thinking he would be shot, said the paper, citing unnamed sources.
In a separate encounter, an interrogator "revved" a power drill near Nashiri's as he stood naked and hooded in a cell, according to the report.
Among the other techniques used, one interrogator used a so-called pressure point technique, manipulating his fingers on a detainee's neck "to restrict the detainees carotid artery."
The interrogator, the document continued "reportedly watched his eyes to the point that the detainee would nod and start to pass out, then ... shook the detainee to wake him."
The report said the interrogator, who repeated the technique three times, later admitted that he "until recently had never been instructed how to conduct interrogations," despite "years of experience debriefing and interviewing people."
The report noted that "the use of pressure points is not, and had not been authorized" as an interrogation technique.
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